Love Is an Action

If you really love someone, then you show it by how you act toward that person.

Love is more than attraction and more than arousal. It’s also more than sentimentality, like so many of today’s songs suggest. By this standard, is love dead when the emotion is gone? No — not at all — because love is an action and a behavior.

Over and over again in the Bible, God commands us to love each other, and you can’t command an emotion. If I told you right now, “Be sad!” you couldn’t be sad on cue. Just like an actor, you can fake it, but you’re not wired for your emotions to change on command.

If love were just an emotion, then God couldn’t command it. But love is something you do. It can produce emotion, but love is an action. 

The Bible says, “Dear children, let’s not merely say that we love each other; let us show the truth by our actions” (1 John 3:18 NLT, second edition). We can talk a good act: “I love people.” But do we really love them? Our love is revealed in how we act toward them.